MT4 or MT5 for Signal Copying?

MetaTrader 5 came out in 2010. Fifteen years on, people are still asking which one to use, which tells you the answer was never as obvious as the version numbers suggest.

For signal copying specifically, most of the usual comparison points do not matter. You are not going to use the strategy tester. You are not writing an Expert Advisor. The extra timeframes and the depth of market are irrelevant when software is placing your trades.

Four differences do matter. Here they are, in the order they will affect you.

Hedging versus netting

This is the big one and it is the reason the answer is not automatic.

MT4 is always hedging. Open a buy and a sell on the same symbol and you hold two independent positions. Open three buys on gold at different prices and you have three separate positions, each with its own stop, its own target, and its own ticket.

MT5 can be either, and your broker decides which when they create the account. A netting account merges everything on a symbol into one position. Buy one lot of gold, then buy another, and you have a single two-lot position at a blended price. Buy one lot then sell one lot and you have nothing.

For a layered entry, netting is a problem. The whole structure depends on your four entry layers existing as four positions with individually managed stops and targets. On a netting account they collapse into one, and the per-layer management that makes a layered entry worth doing has nowhere to live.

So: if you are on MT5, confirm your account is hedging. Most retail forex brokers default to hedging for exactly this reason, and a few do not. It is set when the account is opened and it cannot be changed afterwards, which means finding out late costs you a new account.

Partial closes

MT4 closes part of a position by closing it entirely and reopening the remainder as a new position with a new ticket.

That works. It makes the trade history harder to read, because one trade becomes a chain of tickets, and it means the reopened portion is technically a new position with a new open time.

MT5 reduces the volume on the existing position and keeps the ticket. Cleaner, and easier to reconcile.

This matters if your provider posts "close half at TP1" style instructions, or if you use partial closes in your own configuration. It is a difference in bookkeeping rather than in outcome, but the bookkeeping is what you read afterwards when you are trying to understand your own month.

Pending order types

MT5 has stop-limit orders. MT4 does not.

Almost nothing in signal copying needs them. Entry zones are handled with ordinary limit orders, which both platforms have. I mention it because it appears at the top of every MT4-versus-MT5 comparison and it is worth knowing that it will not affect you.

Symbol naming, which is the one that will actually bite you

Neither platform standardises symbol names, and this causes more practical trouble for signal copying than everything above combined.

Gold is XAUUSD on one broker, GOLD on another, XAUUSD.r or XAUUSD-ECN or XAUUSDm elsewhere. The suffix marks the account type. The same broker will have several variants live at once.

Your provider writes GOLD. Your broker calls it XAUUSD.raw. Something has to map between them, and if the mapping is wrong or missing, the signal does nothing, or worse, it finds something else with a similar name.

That last case is the one to take seriously. On brokers offering shares alongside forex, a fuzzy search for "gold" can turn up a gold mining company, which is a real tradable instrument with a plausible-looking name and nothing to do with spot gold.

So whichever platform you pick: check your symbol mapping before your first real signal, and check it specifically for gold and for any crypto you trade. Those are the two where the wrong instrument is most likely to look right.

What your broker offers matters more than the platform

A practical point that outranks the whole comparison.

Spread and commission on the instruments you actually trade will affect your results more than the platform version will. So will execution quality during the sessions you trade. So will whether the broker is somewhere you can get your money back from.

If your broker offers both and the accounts are otherwise identical, take MT5 with hedging enabled. If your preferred broker's better account type is on MT4, take MT4. The platform difference is small next to the account difference, and I would not move brokers over it.

The short version

Pick MT5 with hedging if you have a free choice. Pick MT4 without hesitation if that is what your broker's good account runs on. Confirm hedging rather than assuming it, and check your symbol mapping before you trade, because that is where the real problems live.

TTMT supports both. Symbol mapping health is surfaced in the dashboard, and a symbol we cannot positively identify is never recommended to you as a match.

Related: what a layered entry is, and what a signal copier is.

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